Blind loyalty. Condi is brilliant, though she's blindly loyal to the President and the administration.

According to the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Bremer in Iraq was removed from the normal chain of accountability:

A few weeks after he landed in Iraq, Bremer informed Hadley [Rice's deputy] that he didn't want to subject his decisions to the "interagency process", a bureaucratic safety valve that allowed the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSC to review and comment on policies. Bremer said he couldn't wait around for the approval from the home office. Rice and Hadley were reluctant to remove Bremer's very long leash, but he was the man on the ground. And after the Garner debacle, the White House wanted a take-charge guy. All right, Hadley told him, you don't have to go through the interagency process. But make sure you run the big stuff by us first.

Bremer told confidants in Baghdad he didn't want to "deal with the Washington squirrel cage". He was a presidential appointee who reported to the president through the secretary of defense. He had no obligation to answer to anyone else. When Paul Wolfowitz or Doug Freith sent messages to him, Bremer directed his deputies to respond.

If Washington wanted something from Bremer's underlings, the request had to be approved by Bremer himself...

(I have a long, boring review of that book on my blog).

This is Washington. Making the best of a bad situation is a laurel on the resume. Not to mention, why give up the power she has and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? I think Condi is going to sail through the inevitable investigations and come out smelling like a rose.

Scott Mclellan discussed Condi in his book, and he seems to agree with LoriFLA- that she is fiercely close with and loyal to the President. He thought (if I recall what he said correctly) that she often agrees with him, and is willing to swallow it if she doesn't.

Condi was a protege of Scowcroft and Shultz -- arguably the "adults" in the Reagan-Bush circle. She also came from the same academic mentor as Madeleine Albright.

How she sold out these credentials to become a second-fiddle Bushie is beyond many people's ken. She certainly will not go down in history as having put her own stamp on foreign policy.

The fact that not only did she not resign, but was instead offered and accepted a promotion within that administration militates against any putative competence or intelligence on her part. Any smart money that may have been there walked long ago. Now, it's just the "dead-enders" left (to borrow a certain bloody-handed asshole's turn of speech.)

Even Powell, the supposedly dovish one on foreign policy finally left, and when the "liberal" of the gang has a past that includes torching hooches in 'Nam, you are well and roundly fucked.

Condoleezi Rice was an incompetent National Security Advisor. She said:

I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

In 1974 Samuel Byck tried to hijack a plane and crash it into the White House. In 1994 Auburn Calloway tried to hijack a FedEx plane and crash it into FedEx's headquarters. Al Qaeda's 1995 Bojinka Plot included a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. In 1998 the FAA was warned that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark." In September 1998, "the [Intelligence Community] obtained information that Bin Laden's next operation might involve flying an explosive-laden aircraft into a U.S. airport and detonating it." In the two years leading up to the September 2001 attacks, NORAD had drills about hijacked planes being crashed into buildings, including the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In October 2000, the Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise simulated a plane crashing into the Pentagon. In July 2001 security measures at the Genoa G-8 conference included surface-to-air missiles to prevent terrorist attacks from the air.

She also likely perjured herself in front of the 9/11 Commission by claiming that "this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us."

On Larry King Live on July 29, 2001, Ms. Rice said," ...In terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

Condi does use a lot of weasel words, that's true, and that is one reason why I think she is going to emerge from this administration unscathed. I would not be surprised if she produces a file for any future charge, a file that will often include a presidential signature.

Condi Rice got her start as a Kremlinologist in the '80s who didn't notice that the Soviet Union was collapsing. She was rewarded for her incompetence then and has shown no sign of improvement since.

And, dare I say it, she was in all the right places at the right times to take advantage of Republican racial tokenism. Another Clarence Thomas.